Pololu Blog (Page 66)

Welcome to the Pololu Blog, where we provide updates about what we and our customers are doing and thinking about. This blog used to be Pololu president Jan Malášek’s Engage Your Brain blog; you can view just those posts here.

My name is Jan Malášek, which is a Czech name, so the “J” is pronounced as an English “Y” (if you care, we can go over the last name in person, or you can consult your local Czech person). I grew up on the Big Island of Hawaii, spent five years in school in Massachusetts, and then moved to Las Vegas, Nevada to work on Pololu. I recently turned 30, and I’m still not the millionaire I had hoped to become at age 23 and then by age 25. Hitting 30 means it has been twenty years since I got started with electronics and ten years since I routed the first circuit board that said “Pololu” on it. Continued…

Alex Louden has released an open-source template for custom 3pi expansion boards for use with the Eagle PCB design software. The picture shows an example expansion with an mbed microcontroller, Xbee, and accelerometers.

Forum user erik46 wrote up a document (523k pdf) showing how to read FrSky telemetry data and display it with a Baby Orangutan. The whole setup is small and light enough to clip on to an RC transmitter. For more information, see his forum post.

This simple obstacle-avoiding robot by forum user TomatoWire is based on the Maestro and uses continuous-rotation servos and distance sensors. The robot is programmed using the Maestro’s internal scripting language, without the need for an additional microcontroller.